Changes in the Labor Supply Behavior of Married Women: 1980–2000 (original) (raw)
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The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2000
This paper examines the impact of working wives on the distribution of family earnings at various life-cycle stages, with particular emphasis on comparisons between the early l970s and the early l990s. The results show that in both time periods, the actual gap between rich and poor families is narrower than if all wives were out of the labor force, and that this equalizing influence of female employment is least pronounced when a child under age six is present in the household. At the same time, the equalizing impact of the wives' contribution is found to have become substantially more pronounced during the l990s, partly because of a decrease over the past two decades in the dispersion of female earnings relative to male earnings.
Research Papers in Economics, 2014
This paper sheds new light on the well-known phenomenon of dwindling wage elasticities for married women in the US over the recent decades. Results of a novel model experiment approach via sample data ordering unveil considerable heterogeneity across different wage groups. Yet surprisingly constant wage elasticity estimates are revealed within certain wage groups over time as well as across two widely used US data sources, the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). These findings refute the assumed presence of a single-valued aggregate wage elasticity for working wives. Although womenAs responsiveness to wages remains largely unchanged over time, we find that the composition of working women into different wage groups has changed considerably, resulting in decreasing wage elasticity estimates at the aggregate level. All these findings were methodologically impossible to acquire had we not dismantled and discarded the stereotyped endogeneity-b...
The Life-Cycle Labor Supply of Married Women and Its Implications for Household Income Inequality
Economic Inquiry, 1992
In a life-cycle model of married womens'labor supply the husband's expected lifetime income should have a greater eflect on his wife's labor supply than should his current income. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, the husband's average lifetime income (over the panel years) does have a greater negative income effect than current income. However, this income effect has declined over time: the labor supply of wives is becoming less sensitive to their husbands' incomes. This declining elasticity would cause household income inequality to worsen over time, but has been o f i t by other factors. plications for income inequality. The pop-Associate Professor of Economics, Carnegie Mellon University. The author wishes to thank Edward Montgomery, Mark Killingsworth, Alice Nakamura, Walter Oi, James Poterba, seminar participants at the University of Rochester, and anonymous referees for insightful comments. 1. See Killingsworth and Heckman [1986] for a review and references.
University of Massachusetts Amherst WP, 2005
This paper investigates whether one's effort to keep up with the Joneses has any effect on labor supply behavior. We provide a simple model and empirical evidence that labor supply decisions of married women are influenced by relative as well as absolute income of their husbands. We find, after controlling for husbands' absolute income and other individual characteristics, that married women are more likely to be in labor force when their husbands' relative income is low. Results are robust across various settings and measures of relative income and the size of the effect is economically meaningful. We also show that income inequality of reference group of husbands in age-regional cross sections can be a predictor of their wives' labor supply.
Labour Supply and Taxes: New Estimates of the Responses of Wives to Husbands' Wages
SSRN Electronic Journal
Labour Supply and Taxes: New Estimates of the Responses of Wives to Husbands' Wages * In this paper, we estimate income-and substitution-labour supply and participation elasticities for Canadian married women using data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics 1996-2005. We use the Canadian Tax and Credit Simulator (CTaCS) and detailed information on the structure of income at the household level to compute the marginal tax rates faced by each individual. We then use these marginal tax rates to compute net ownwage, spouse-wage, and non-labour income. We show how the magnitude of the estimated elasticities varies depending on whether net or gross wages and income are used in the estimation procedure, and quantify biases caused by using average instead of marginal tax rates. Finally, because marginal tax rates vary significantly over the sample, we use quantile regressions to compare elasticities at different points of the hours distribution. Overall, our results show that public policies now have, on average, less scope for influencing hours of work than 10 years ago. However, the quantile results show that wives working fewer hours per week are more sensitive to changes in their own or spouses' wages.
Trends in the Labor Force Participation of Married Women
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2007
This study seeks to quantify determinants, and costs, of the labor-force participation of married women. We use demographic and earnings data from the Health and Retirement Study. The earnings data constitute an unusually long panel but have the defect of lacking corresponding reports on work hours. By using a highly structured model and concentrating on the participation margin, we nevertheless feel that we can make substantial progress. Our preliminary regression results imply that married women's market work disrupts their household consumption slightly less than one half as much as men's work (relative to complete household retirement). We lay out a course of additional steps that can, we believe, clarify these results even more precisely in the near future.
The Effect of Women's Labor Force Participation on the Distribution of Income in the United States
Annual Review of Sociology, 1987
Because the wives of highly paid men participate less in the labor force, the earnings of working wives make the distribution of pretax, money income more equal for families than it might otherwise be. Although there is considerable speculation that future developments in women's labor force participation may foster greater inequality, the empirical results are mixed. To assess the impact of women's labor force participation on the distribution of well-being, future research will need to consider the implications of taxes, job-related expenses, fringe benefits, and the value of homemaker services. Future research would also benefit from linking empirical research to an implicit sociological theory of family income-getting—one that recognizes the motivational structure of household decision-making as well as the changing environment that families face. Rising housing costs, poorer economic prospects of young men, and women's higher wage rates, for example, make wives'...